BKWLD Puts the ‘Good’ in ‘Good Morning’ for McDonald’s

The digital experts at BKWLD recently teamed with creative agency Hoffman Lewis to deliver a multi-layered, hands-on, and experimental new integrated campaign for McDonald’s. Tasked with increasing brand favorability and, more specifically, breakfast sales in the St. Louis market, BKWLD executed the production of six :30 broadcast spots, one mobile application, and a website to serve as a digital hub aggregating user chatter and special offers.

BKWLD worked with Hoffman Lewis to create six unique and unexpected moments for the general public of St. Louis. Working entirely with non-actors, the BKWLD team designed real situations where McDonald’s breakfast could help make the ‘ordinary a bit more extraordinary’. These moments were shot with hidden camera crews and then transformed into the TV spots, with BKWLD storyboarding, directing, producing, and handling post for each.

“The spots needed to feel fun and honest, but not become a cliché flash-mob-thing,” noted BKWLD AD Ethan Martin. “We collaborated with HL to choose the best combination of locations and relating scenarios that were both strategic to the messaging, while maintaining an efficient production budget and timeline.”

To create a digital hub for the GoodMorningSTL campaign, BKWLD developers created a site that aggregated users’ social media content from Instagram and Twitter using the hashtag #goodmorningstl. Special offers and contest winners were announced daily. The BKWLD team realized early on that user-generated content from mobile devices would be a key component of the site, so they created a site that would that would be easily viewable on small screens and function well with the slower speeds of cellular networks.

“The essence of the site is user-generated content, so our goal with the UX was to create a clean, straightforward experience,” added BKWLD Video Director Chad Turner. “This led us to a content-first approach, with a responsive architecture that let users quickly find pertinent info such as deals and contest winners, while also allowing them to casually browse through tweets and photos.”

McDonald’s and Hoffman Lewis needed a website that could populate itself with user-generated content and successfully drive interest in the downloadable mobile app that BKWLD was developing. For the site, BKWLD developers paired their proprietary ‘Decoy’ CMS platform with a custom implementation of ‘tag subscriptions’ within Instagram’s API, as well as the equivalent functionality with Twitter. To keep development costs manageable, the team built efficiencies with the Alarm Clock App by developing it in Appcelerator’s Titanium, which afforded broader support to Android devices as well as iOS.

About BKWLD:

We are an independent digital agency founded in 2001. We begin with the user first – before ourselves, before our own creative ambitions, our lust for awards, or industry accolades. Our charge is to find what users value, then the best use of concept and medium to deliver it. Whether it is creative digital strategy and execution, branded content, or live-action production and post, our team is dedicated to doing great work for great clients, and we have a hell of a time doing it.